Thursday, October 28, 2010

Here are the possible Clear Winter/Spring hair colors, skin tones, and eye colors for people all over the world.

Clear Winter

Hair Color: Black, medium to dark brown, ash brown.﻿

Skin Tone: Deep beige, cocoa, deep brown, light or neutral beige, "porcelain". All skin tones usually have a translucent quality. This simply means there is a natural shine or reflective quality to the skin. It does not look dry, but is radient. This not a result of using oils or lotions. It is naturally that way.

Eye Color: Bright, sparkling, clear, or intense; blue, violet, emerald green, light hazel (blue and brown or green and brown), gray, black. The whites of the eye are usually very white.

Monday, October 25, 2010

Color analysis is only concerned with hair color skin tone and eye color, so I've decided to stick with color and color only.

This is not about nationality or ancestry, again this is about color, so I will provide a list of possible hair, skin, and eye color for each category. You should be able to see clearly where you fit in regardless of who you are or where you come from in the world. It should not matter if you are in any of the three main categories of people, that is, European, African or Asian.

I will also stick with the tonal seaonal color analysis (Deep, Light, Warm, Cool, Clear, and Soft) and the absolutes of the Seasons Winter, Summer, Autumn, and Spring. Somehow after doing more research this seems to be the most accurate and everyone is covered.

So in the post to come I will be providing information that should be of great help to those who want to know what colors look best on them.

Thursday, October 21, 2010

Many times we see a color and think that we can accurately name it. This is also the same with skin tone. Usually we do not have it right because we have been trained to see color and skintones based on what we have been taught. This article will attempt to address the way we see these things.

The first thing to understand is that our brain determines how we see color. This usually comes from what we are told as children. We are told that the ocean is blue, when in reality it is a reflection of the blue sky on a clear day. If it's cloudy and stormy the ocean would be grey. The truth is water is clear and may reflect any colour.

So in order to see color correctly we have to get rid of our preconceived notions of color. This can be very difficult to do, but it is worth it. It is only then you will be able to truely see something for what it is and not what you think it should be.

Black, White and Gray

Value is one of the three features of color. The other 2 are Hue and Intensity. For now let's look at value. Value is concerned with how light or dark a colour is. Shades and tints are another way of referring to value. Shades are created by adding black to a colour and tints are created by adding white. A value scale helps to determine how light or dark something is and ranges from White to black.

Value Scale

Now let's see how this applies to skintone.

Black And White Skintone?

There is a question mark here because if you have taken a good look at the value scale above, you can understand that there are no black or white skintones. As was said earlier, this is just one of our many preconceived notions about color. We are told that there are different races among humans. The different races are identified according to color. These are black, white, red, yellow, and brown. Is this really accurate?

The Color Orange and Skin Tone

In order to tackle this, we need to understand the other 2 features of color, hue and intensity. Hue is the name of a color and this only applies to what is seen on the color wheel. You have red, red-orange, orange, yellow-orange, yellow, yellow-green, green, blue-green, blue, blue-violet, violet, red-violet. So there are 12 hues in all. Fashionable names like mauve and peach do not count. They simply come from red-violet and red-orange.

The Color Wheel

Intensity is the brightness or dullness of a color. This can also be called chroma or saturation. The intensity can range from a pure hue to no color.

Intensity Scale

So how does this apply to skintones?

All skintones come from the hue orange, with additions of white and black to form the various shades and tints. Orange and black make brown. If you add more white it becomes lighter. If black is added it becomes darker. So the reality is we are all various shades of brown and not red, black, white, yellow and brown. It's just brown. Consider the following illustration.

Skintones

Various Skintones Of Real People

There may be those who closer to white or closer to black but they are never exactly white or black. Most times they are just a very pale or very dark brown. Most people on the planet fall somewhere in between.

Olive Skintones

There are many people around the world who believe that they have an olive skintone. I've always wondered about this because as far as I know olives come in two colors, black and green.

Black Olives

Green Olives

Unless your skin looks something like Hulk's, how on earth can a human being have green skin? By the way, if your skin looks greenish or has a greenish hue, that still does not make it olive green. There are people however with skintones that are olive black or at least very close to it.

Chocolate Brown Skintone

This is another one that confuses many people. My skintone is considered light brown by some and dark by others. I've even been called dark chocolate brown. It is really medium to light brown. There are two main types of processed chocolate, milk chocolate and dark chocolate. Look at the following illustration.

My Skintone

Milk Chocolate

Dark Chocolate

Do you see the difference?

Just because someone is darker compared to a lightskin person does not mean that they are super dark or very dark. It does not automatically make their skintone chocolate. If they match the following pictures of chocolate, then that's a different story.

When it comes to color analysis, is everyone with a black hair color automatically a Winter or a Deep? It is easy to come to this conclusion, but the fact is that not everyone is a Deep Winter or a Deep Autumn because they have black hair. This is especially true for people of Afican and Asian ancestry, because there is a tendancy to assume that we are all winters. I gave my experience in a post entitled My First Experience with Color Analysis.

So if you are of African or Asian decent and you want to see a list of possibilities for each color category, I will make a list in my next post. I got this list from the book Always in Styleby Doris Poser. She divides all people of the world into three very general sections; Caucasian (which includes all Europeans), African-American (which includes all people of African ancestry), and Asian. Even though the categories are very broad, this has helped me to find my true coloring.

In the posts to come I will look at each category but I will name each broad category of the world's peoples differently; a) African b) European and c) Asian. Now there are some people who not believe that they are Africans, Europeans, or Asians because they live in a different country. So I have to make myself clear so that everyone will understand that this is about color and not nationality.

When I say African, I mean those that have what society calls "black" skin. More accurately this should be called brown skin. So this includes everyone and I mean everyone wherever they are in the world that has brown skin. It could be from dark chocolate brown to a very light brown (known as beige). It does not matter, this category is African.

When I say European, I mean those that have what society calls "white" skin. This again is not accurate, because nobody has white skin unless you are white like white paper. So for the sake of understanding this category is termed European.

Last but not least, when I say Asian, I mean those that have what society calls "yellow" skin. Again, this is not accurate if you know what the color yellow looks like. This category is particularly tricky, because what countries does Asia include? You will find people there who like they are of african decent. Most times when society says "yellow" they mean people from China, Korea, and Japan. If you are darker or are closer to a brown skintone, I guess you can examine both the African and Asian Category to see where you fit best.

When I had my colors done, I was around 19 or 20 years old at the time. It was to be a birthday present to myself. The first book I ever read on color analysis was “Color Me Beautiful” by Carole Jackson.

It was given to me by a friend since she knew about my interest in fashion and color analysis. It was quite informative, but I noticed that there were not enough models that looked like me, someone of African decent. I decided that having my colors done professionally would help me determine for certainty what my colors were. This is what led me to set up an appointment with a cosmetics company that did Seasonal Color Analysis.

I wore a light lavender cotton scarf that covered my head. When I arrived at the store, the consultant introduced herself and told me where to sit. I asked her if I needed to take off the scarf and she said I could keep it on and that it did not matter. This was confusing to me, because I know that colors can clash throwing off the analysis. This did not seem to concern her.

She did the draping, starting with gold and silver fabric to determine if I had a warm or cool skin tone. She thought that I was cool, because as far as she could tell, the silver fabric looked better. The lavender scarf was throwing the analysis off, but I was too shy at the time to tell her that maybe the scarf was interfering somehow, because I do not look good in silver. I decided to trust her expertise, which was quite foolish of me. She was not following the proper procedure.

We went through all the colors, and at the end of the session, I was classified as a Winter. This was wrong to me, because I knew that I looked better in warmer colors. I never get complements with cool colors. If you are a person with melinated skin of any degree, you are automatically classified a Winter. In most cases most of us are more warm than cool.

This happened to me twice, even when I was not wearing a headscarf. I believe this is why I started becoming sceptical of having a professional analysis done. When someone rushes through an analysis assuming that you are a particular season, are they serious about helping you? This is when I started doing my own research.

I am passionate about color and I would like to be a certified color analyst soon. I know that things have improved over the years, but there could still be more representation of other skin tones out there in the world from the lightest to the darkest. When I say lightest to darkest I do not mean dark skinned Caucasians and light skinned blacks which make no sense to me. I mean the entire range of skin tones seen worldwide from the darkest to the lightest in all nationalities.

Color analysis has gone through a major transformation since the 1980s when the four seasons were used. While this was a good starting point, there were limitations, because there were many people who did not fit completely in one season. Things have changed over the years with research and experimentation. So now the categories have expanded.

The seasonal system was made popular by Color Me Beautiful by Carol Jackson, which was published in 1980. The other book was Color Me A Season by Bernice Kentner which was published in 1978.

The seasonal system was based on the four seasons, Winter, Spring, Summer and Autumn. Spring and Autumn the warm seasons, while Summer and Winter are the cool seasons. This system presumed that everyone in the world was divided into the four seasons. It was also presumed that everyone had either a warm or cool skintone. This has caused quite a bit of confusion for many clients as the majority of people worldwide are not just warm or cool but neutral.

Today, we are more informed about color than ever before. You can find twelve to as many as sixteen color categories. This is due to an expansion of the seasonal system of analysis. Different color analyst use different systems but in any case, it is best to have an analysis done by someone who has been trained to identify warm, cool, and neutral categories. The following is a list of some of the categories that may be used:

A. Light , Deep, Warm, Cool, Soft (or Muted), Clear (or Bright).

Some analyst use these categories on their own, but in reality you could be classified as a Light Spring/Summer, Deep Winter/Autumn, Warm Spring/Autumn, Cool Winter/Summer, Soft Autumn/Summer, or a Clear Winter/Spring.B. Some color analysts combine two seasons together. This creates sixteen color categories, for example, you might be a Pastel Spring which is a blend of Spring and Summer. This means that you are primarily Spring with some Summer influence.

Many color analyst are trained differently so you may have do some research to find out which method appeals or makes sense to you and go with that. One method may work better for you than the other.

Color theory provides a set of guidelines on how to create the colors you find on the color wheel and any other color in general.
There are three primary colors. They are red, yellow, and blue. They are called primaries because they cannot be created using other colors. From these three colors, the other colors are born.

Each primary color has two secondary colors. Just for fun, noticed how there is no blue-orange, red-green, or yellow-violet. The tertiaries are formed based on the primary and seconday colors that are closest to each other.

Another thing to keep in mind is that each tertiary color contain all the primary colors red, yellow, blue.

Wednesday, October 20, 2010

Would you like to know if you have a warm or cool skin tone? Watch this video, then read the rest of this post for additional tips.

Trying to figure out the different skin tones can be very confusing because there are a number of methods that are used. When doing the vein test in particular however, there are many of African decent with very dark skin that cannot see their veins. This also applies to those of European decent that have opaque skin. If this is a problem for you, another way to figure out if you have a warm or cool skin tone, is to compare hand palms. Anyone can do this. I compared my hand palms with my cousin's who is much darker than I am, close to dark chocolate. Her hand palm is "blue" and mine is "golden" or peachy. Try it and tell me how it works!

Tuesday, October 19, 2010

When reading books on color analysis, it seems as if only people with lighter skintones are featured more than people with darker skintones. It's not that they do not have information on what will work for those of us who are darker, it's just that you don't see it featured along side the others. If we are featured at all, it's always one or two at most. So I decided to use what information I have to show how people with different skintones fit in each category. I will be using the categories Deep, Light, Clear, Soft, Warm, and Cool.

If you are Deep, you may be a Deep Winter or a Deep Autumn.

If you are Light, you may be a Light Spring or a Light Summer.

If you are Clear, you may be a Clear Winter or a Clear Spring.

If you are Soft, you may be a Soft Autumn or a Soft Summer.

If you are Warm, you may be a Warm Autumn or a Warm Spring.

If you are Cool, you may be a Cool Winter or a Cool Summer.

There is also a system where two seasons are combined. So you may be an absolute season like Winter, Summer, Spring, Autumn, or you may be a combination of any two. So I will do my best to tackle both as both systems are my favorite. There is another reason why I will do both. One method may work for some people and the other system may not work for others. The sources I will be using are as follows:

Monday, October 18, 2010

Welcome to Color and Style. In this blog you will find great information on color, and finding your unique style. There are others things that will be looked at like fashion and art, color theory, reviews on different products, and anything else related to color and style.

It is really an artsy type site and I hope that you will enjoy it and find something that will be of use to you. That is the aim of this site. To help others find their way in this maze of brands and cookie cutter likes and dislikes. For this reason, you will not see gossips about celebrities, reality shows and follow-ups on the latest trends. It's about thinking for yourself and elevating the mind. Feel free to email me if you have any questions at smacolorandstyle@gmail.com.